Art Palestine International is a New York-based cultural organization dedicated to Palestinian contemporary art. We collaborate with museums, galleries, and non-profits to produce art exhibitions, events, and publications.

This blog is a research tool that allows us to chart our research and invite others along on the journey.

ISTANBUL— Months of secrecy have just come to an end. Yesterday, the much anticipated “Untitled (12th Istanbul Biennial),” 2011, curated by Jens Hoffmann and Adriano Pedrosa, opened for a preview. The 4000 guests were finally allowed to look at an exhibition, which until then, had been kept strictly under wraps.

Hosted and produced by The Ethnographic and Art Museum in partnership with the Institute of Women’s Studies at Birzeit University, Framed-Unframed is the first critical exploration of the transformation in the representations of women in Palestinian visual arts within a changing political context. The timeframe is from the 1970s to today.

Palestinian artists, whether living under occupation or in the diaspora – artists such as Ismail Shammout, Nabil Anani, and Sliman Mansour – took the lead in the 1960s and 1970’ s in using the Palestinian female form in their classically rendered paintings. Until today, and despite the changing times, the same iconic depictions of Palestine as the peasant woman in an embroidered traditional costume is used over and over in posters and other mediums, for collective political mobilisation for Palestinian resistance.

The post-1967 iconic or foundational works, mostly by male artists, are represented in this exhibition by Sliman Mansur, Nabil Anani, Kamel Moghanni, Naji al-Ali, and Burhan Karkutli (a Syrian artist who devoted his art to Palestine). These artists have expressed through the female figure the complex meanings of nation, rootedness, resistance, fecundity, and Palestine itself. Salma (1978)by Sliman Mansour, is solidly “framed” within such political notions; she represents a monumental Palestinian woman wearing a peasant dress and holding the fruit of the land in her labourer hands.

While these foundation themes of representation of the female figure continued into the early 1980s, they arguably exhausted themselves by the beginning of the Oslo period.

The earlier trends were also juxtaposed in the 1980s by the emergence of a new dynamic in Palestinian art and more contemporary representations of the female body, continuing with vigour today. Across various geographies and “unframed” by conventional media, Palestinian women artists employed the female body in a surge of challenging works as a reflection of the self, as a critique of feminist discourse, and as a strong conceptual comment on social, political, religious, or environmental issues. The highly charged political works of Mona Hatoum in the 1980s heralded the creative engagement of artists with contemporary modes of expression and the use of technology, video art, photography, installation art, and performance, among others, to convey provocative thoughts and reflective observations. Challenged bythese contemporaryand versatile expressive modes, many Palestinian women artists started to use the female body, often their own, to express strong, individualised, and critically engaging views, thus taking Palestinian visual arts into universal realms of critical debate and conceptual engagement.

Framed-Unframed, which is curated by Vera Tamari and InassYassin, will open at the Ethnographic and Art Museum at Birzeit University on 19 September 2011,and will run until 29 October. It offers a selection of works dealing with the female figure by prominent Palestinian artists including those listed above as well as Laila Shawa, Mona Hatoum, Raeda Saadeh, Mary Tuma, Jumana Abboud, Amer Shomali, Vera Tamari, Inass Yassin, Samira Badran, Hani Zurub, Ayman Issa, Ahlam Shibli and Rula Halawani.

The exhibition runs at the Birzeit University Museum between 19 September 2011 until 29 October 2011.

Art Territories, curated by Shuruq Harb and Ursula Biemann, offered a series of workshops, symposiums and bus tours in and around the city of Ramallah, July 21-24, 2011.

Entitled, DESIGNING CIVIC ENCOUNTERS, the project was conceived as a vibrant, multimedia laboratory of ideas and debates. The program included a two-day symposium on questions of urban transformations in Palestinian and other Arab cities and a workshop with architect Teddy Cruz.